Structural Considerations in Serial Poetry: Foundations

Writing good serial literature requires a keen sense of structure. There are many different aspects of structure which are relevant to this practice. Writers and readers are free to choose whatever options suit their skills, interests, or the subject matter at hand. Nobody is locked into doing things only one way; diverse examples exist, and that's a good thing. Let's take a look at some of the established options.First, we may draw a distinction between serialized vs. serial literature. That is, a series may be completed before publication, or it may be published as each segment is completed. Material may be written en masse and then divided for publication, or it may be written in distinct segments from the beginning. The story arc may be closed (with a planned end) or open (an ongoing stream of activities without a clear conclusion). The primary distinction is that serialized content is completed before publication, while serial content is published as written. Secondary aspects include: Serialized content tends to be written en masse and then divided (as in a serialized novel) and usually has a planned end. Serial content tends to be written in segments (like episodes of a TV series) and often has an open-ended story arc. You can see how these aspects typically stack together, but it's possible to mix and match them.Now consider how this interacts with the form of poetry. Most poems are self-contained; it's rare, though possible, to write a single long poem with "chapters" or other sectional divisions. So serial poetry tends to be written one poem at a time. That also means that it's more common to see a series released one poem at a time than as a completed work, although chapbook publication is a known example of how a series can be presented all at once. Poetry works equally well for open-ended and closed story arcs; that just comes down to authorial choice and what suits a given project. Some examples from my work: While I've done some lengthy poems, and poems with divisions, my poetic series are pretty much all compiled from individual poems. Almost all of them have been posted as written, as indicated from the writing and posting dates. However, if you look at The Clockwork War on my Serial Poetry page, you can see that four of the five were written in a single day and posted later; I added the fifth because I realized later that the story was missing its conclusion. Notice also that this is among my least successful series in terms of audience support: only the first poem was sponsored, and I posted the rest because I considered the topic (soldiers with disabilities) compelling enough that it needed to be in the public view.

I use both open-ended and closed story arcs, and my most popular series span those two categories. Fiorenza the Wisewoman and Monster House are both open-ended, featuring the everyday activities of folks who live in interesting situations where something is always going on. Path of the Paladins had an obvious plot from the beginning: watch Ari grow into herself as a paladin, and put the mangled world back in working order. The Origami Mage evolved a plot over time; it started with an obvious conflict between two rival characters, and gradually indicated that they were working toward resolving that conflict. This last effect is particular to the way I write series poetry, because far more often than not, it's my audience deciding what becomes a series and what doesn't. They ask for more of what they like, and the more people who like something, the more prompts and money it gets, so the more poems it develops. That makes it an exception to the rule that serial literature works better if designed as such from the beginning, because then you can make good choices about things that work well in a series. My audience is basically doing that in reverse: out of the hundreds of poems I write in a year, they pick the ones that happen to have the features of a good series hook. Look at what they're picking: almost always memorable characters with a clear nose for trouble, sometimes an engrossing plot conflict that isn't fully resolved but left at a reasonable stopping point, and a couple examples (see Lacquerware and The Ocracies) where a setting and its motifs are just fun to wander around in poking at stuff. I have found my audience to be highly reliable gatekeepers, taking over the role historically held by editors. Sometimes they skip things that I personally think are awesome, but I have yet to see them latch onto something that wasn't rich in potential. The end result, for me, is a lot like serving as the gamemaster of a roleplaying game. I set the scene, put some characters in play, and describe an initial encounter. Then people give me suggestions about what should happen next, pose challenges for the characters, ask questions about the setting, etc. Those tend to have a huge impact on how a series develops. In fact this characterizes not just my poetic series, but a majority of serial work that employs high creator/audience interaction. If you want to enjoy live series, I recommend viewing that as a feature, not a bug.Closely related to the above major distinctions are two more issues of structure. First, a storyline may have low, medium, or high continuity. Continual tales have minimal breaks and flow smoothly from one installment to another. You need to start at the beginning, and missing parts will make later ones less understandable, because the action builds on itself as it goes along. Major changes in character and setting drive the evolution. Episodic tales have clear breaks and the events in one episode have little or no influence on what happens later, even if they involve the same characters and/or setting. It doesn't matter much if you miss some, or even consume them out of order, because few if any major changes to characters or setting will occur. In between lie those tales which have a core plot but spread it out, so that some episodes relate to it and others don't. Major changes are occasional but once established they remain so unless altered again in a later episode. Next, a storyline may use cliffhangers or completed episodes. Continual tales are more prone to cliffhangers. Episodes tend to be more self-contained. In between lie those tales that usually wrap up within an episode but sometimes do a multi-part arclet of several episodes, and often those arclets have cliffhangers between the parts. Cliffhangers are not obligatory in serial entertainment. Some readers and writers love cliffhangers while others hate them. There are folks who forget to read new installments without that reminder, and others who read only series published as complete because they hate to be left hanging. Also consider that cliffhangers can be a crutch. If your audience doesn't care about the story or characters without dangling somebody over a cliff, you're doing something wrong. If your characters and story are compelling, people will keep following them without the repetitious threat.I haven't written any series reliant on cliffhangers. That doesn't mean it's impossible to do in poetry, just not really my thing. I find that poetry lends itself much better to self-contained episodes. However, some of my series have a very strong continuity, while others have only a loose chronological flow. That's okay too. About the only thing I do with cliffhangers is notice how they affect crowdfunding. It's not rare for my longer narrative poems to have intense action where breaking between verses could create a cliffhanger. Since I often post these verse-by-verse as they are sponsored in microfunding, that can happen. Sometimes it encourages readers to make more donations to find out what happens next. I suspect they're more responsive to that precisely because it doesn't happen all the time. Now let's examine a structural element from another serial form, comics. Panel transitions shape the flow of a story within a comic. They define how much changes from one frame to the next; moment-to-moment is a small change while scene-to-scene is a large change. They also define the nature of the change; action-to-action closely follows line of plot in sequential time, subject-to-subject skips along characters or items within the same time and place, and aspect-to-aspect follows mood or idea without being closely bound by time or space. Some comic traditions overwhelmingly use one transition type, while others combine them. Compare this to serial fiction; like western comics, it heavily favors action-to-action transitions, sometimes leavened with subject-to-subject and scene-to-scene. Some experimental comics, and fiction, favor a different type of transition(s). Eastern comics -- and the rest of their cultural material -- spread across more types of transition and are particularly known for capitalizing on aspect-to-aspect in developing mood or theme.How does this work in poetry? We can imagine each verse as a frame OR each poem as a frame; both are useful. Haiku lends itself to moment-to-moment, aspect-to-aspect, or non-sequitur transitions. Check out my Lacquerware series and notice how it resembles looking around a room at individual objects. I don't usually write this way, but it's cool as a diversion. Ballads, many medium-size form poems such as sonnets or villanelles, and free verse work well with the narrative transitions of action-to-action, subject-to-subject, and scene-to-scene. Humorous and surreal poetry -- remember dadaism? -- is ideal for non-sequitur transitions. This takes advantage of the fact that poetry has more leeway than other literature; it is not always required to make logical sense. Looking specifically at poem-to-poem transitions, a majority tend to resemble subject-to-subject or scene-to-scene. That is, the focus shifts from one character to another (sometimes within the same time and space, though not necessarily) or from one set of events to another (sometimes with the same characters, but not always). The Origami Mage often makes use of subject-to-subject changes because it has two focal characters. One area where poetic series tend to outperform fictional series is in aspect-to-aspect transitions. Poetry can meander or contemplate, without seeming to be lost, better than fiction can. So it's perfectly okay to stop and smell the roses, to step outside the main plotline and write a poem about a rock in a river or a mule plowing a field. What would probably feel like a distraction in a fictional series is more likely to work as a thoughtful interlude in a poetic series -- although, as with cliffhangers, some people love this stuff while others hate it.By the way, if you enjoy comics and you do well at taking educational materials outside their original context, I highly recommend the book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. You can learn a great deal about the expectations, structure, pacing, and development of entertainment there. Comics and poetry have a lot more common ground in their structure than most people realize.What do you consider the most important foundation for a series? Can you think of other things particular to the underlying structure of serial poetry?

Companion Poem: "The Truth in the Tower"

"The Truth in the Tower" came out of the March 1, 2011 Poetry Fishbowl. It was crowdfunded by a bunch of different people, and originally posted on my LiveJournal. While writing this poem, I did a bunch of research on Italian wildlife and culture. You can find the other poems in the series Fiorenza the Wisewoman on my Serial Poetry page. One interesting thing is that this poem contains a number of cliffhangers between verses, and some of those came up during the crowdfunding process. That helped encourage more donations. After verse 12 is a notable one, and after 17 another. It's kind of fun to look for these potential cliffhangers in my longer narrative poems, and then watch to see if any of them activate depending on how the donations come in.